Journal of Economic and Social Measurement

This paper provides a new set of monthly price-competitiveness indicators for 62 countries, which are to be adopted by the Bank of Italy as its new official indicators. We employ updated trade weights that take into account the highly relevant competitive pressures of local producers in all outlet markets while guaranteeing a vast geographical coverage in international standards. We also assess price competitiveness with respective to different sub-groups of trading partners, namely euro-area vs. non euro-area countries. Focusing on the four largest economies in the euro area, in the period 1999-2014 Germany and France's price competitiveness is found to have improved; it was roughly stable in Italy whereas it deteriorated in Spain.

The U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently developed a substantially improved measure of poverty, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The SPM has only been released since 2009, and prior efforts by researchers to construct a historical SPM time series have not taken into account an essential element of the new measure - geographical differences in the cost of living - which is necessary for accurately describing poverty trends in important demographic and regional subgroups. We build the first historical SPM time series from 1967-2014 that adjusts poverty thresholds for cost of living. We do so bringing together a constellation of data sources - the Current Population Survey, the Decennial Census, the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Fair Market Rents, and others. We find that geographically adjusting thresholds increases poverty rates in metro areas, the Western states, and among Latinos, but decreases poverty rates in non-metro areas and in the South. The geographic adjustment of poverty thresholds is an impactful component of the SPM.

A frequent criticism of GDP states that events that obviously reduce welfare of people can nevertheless increase GDP per capita. We use data of natural disasters as quasi experiments to examine whether alternatives to GDP (Human Development Index, Progress Index, Index of Economic Well-Being and a Happiness Index) lead to more plausible responses to disasters. Applying a Differences-in-Differences approach and estimates from various panels of countries we find no noteworthy differences between the response of real GDP per capita and the responses of suggested alternative welfare measures to a natural disaster except for the Human Development Index.

In a 1995 the National Research Council released a report that critically examined poverty measurement in the United States and recommended the development of a measure of medical expenditure related economic risk; a 2012 report continued support for such a measure. This study uses the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to examine two alternative strategies for classifying individual-level risk for purposes of developing a loss modeling-based measure of medical care economic risk (MCER). Examining the use of self-perceived health and a DxCG risk score to classify individuals into five levels of risk, the study finds substantial differences in cell-level classification and attributed expenditure risk based on these two strategies. It is suggested that future work in this field move forward with the use of a risk score classification strategy to operationalize the MCER measure.

The paper argues that additive inconsistencies in national accounts may be admissible, and coped with, within the scope of a national economy, and over a short period of time, but they are destructive when carried up to a supranational, or even global level, and over the long run. The paper proves that in contrast to current tenets an additive chain index consistent in aggregation exists, and it demonstrates the theoretical fact by application to actual data from Denmark, and Germany. The theory behind is simple, not mathematics but pure logic: a value added which is not additive is a contradiction, in itself. The paper has been presented to the IARIW-OECD Special Conference on ``The Future of the SNA'' held at Paris, France, on April 16-17, 2015.